Days We Left Behind

I love this new Paul McCartney song, Days We Left Behind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n1IhyF6R0U&list=RD2n1IhyF6R0U&start_radio=1

It's my favourite song of his for a long time, and it may even end up being my favourite song of his post-Beatles.

Even though a lot of that music deals in whimsical nostalgia, just like this one, somehow this song has moved me deeply, and feels precise, uncynical and revelatory.

It's funny to think that, in all the time I've been following the charts (let's say 40 years), Macca hasn't had a bona fide solo Top 10 hit single. Although the Bluesky dads got briefly excited about this one when it dropped last Friday, it hasn't cracked the Top 100, so that long streak of relative failure looks safe.

For 20+ years, he was the greatest hit machine in history. I've just watched Man on the Run, the documentary abot Wings, which I'd been warned was a bit flash and annoying to watch, but actually I found very informative and sweet, and it's worth remembering that, through the 70s, though there were lulls, Wings were pretty massive. They had six US Number 1s, Mull of Kintyre was the bestselling UK single ever for a time - he still had the magic touch. In the early 80s, you've got Ebony and Ivory, The Girl is Mine, Say Say Say, Pipes of Peace, and then the Frog Chorus, which was basically the last big hit, so maybe that's why. Maybe he lost his single-buying audience with one fell amphibian swoop.

He's featured on loads of Charity Number 1s since, and there was the collaboration with Kanye West (weird to remember that ...) but there have been some nice songs since then, but nothing that has captured the public. Not that unusual for a 40-odd musician, i suppose, but this is Paul McCartney, and Bowie, Springsteen, Rod Stewart, Queen, Elton John in abundance, they've all had hits since then. Even Dylan - his albums are big news and sell well, whereas there's a regular McCartney album cycle - he'll go on Jools Holland, do some nice press, everyone will be happy to see him again, but no big sales or impact. Of course, he remains a huge live act - that in a way adds to the oddness of it. His musicianship, his voice, his popularity, has held up better than anyone, yet he can't get a wider audience interested in his new music.

Which is a shame with this song, as it's wonderful. 

The lyrics in the bridge

"We met at Forthlin Road

And wrote a secret code

To never be spoken

I stand by what I said

The promise that I made

Will never be broken"

I cannot stop thinking about. Okay, in some ways, it's just some nice little rhyming phrases, but what if we take it at face value? What if him and Lennon really did write a secret code, never to be spoken, which unlocked the secret of pop music? What if they did make promises to each other which McCartney has never revealed and which he holds to this day? It's overwhelming, in a way, yet equally, just a small thing ...

Babylon

David Gray's 'Babylon' came up on my youtube algorithm last week. 

If youtube had existed in 2000, 'Babylon' would probably have come up on my youtube algorithm then, as something youtube thought was a bit like the kind of things I like, and I'd have curtly dismissed it as maybe in the same rough territory as the kind of things I like, but very much not the kind of thing I like.

But, in 2026, I watched/listened to it, and thought "aah, good song, after all".

I distinctly remember the first time I saw Babylon performed by David Gray, which was on Jools Holland in April 2000 - me, John and Alex watching on a Friday night in our student place on Baker Lane, cruelly distracted by Gray's wobbling head, and deciding this guy was not for us. 

I'd heard of him before, I think I'd read about him being a big star in Ireland (indeed I think I thought he was Irish) but that was the first time I heard/saw him. After that he was everywhere, or rather his music was everywhere. That was a star-making performance - Babylon became a hit, and the album White Ladder, which had first been released in 1998, became the ultimate sleeper hit.

It is still the biggest selling album of all time in Ireland, and is still, I think, in the Top 10 best selling albums in Britain this century. It also sold over 2 million copies in the US - indeed Gray had sustained success over several albums in America - a lot more than, say, Robbie Williams.

For those early years of the 2000s, the likes of White Ladder, Dido's No Angel, Moby's Play, not to mention Travis and Coldplay, were ubiquitous and described by the music weeklys, which I was still reading, as bland, coffee-table music. You would hear the albums at sedate dinner parties, and, generally, though I was never cool, I fancied my taste in music to be cooler than that.

As far as I can tell, Gray remains a pretty lowkey, anonymous figure. I watched a couple of interviews with him after rewatching Babylon and he's pretty endearing, and pretty good at talking about his music in a clear, interesting way.

A few years ago, as an act of supposed self-torture, I listened to White Ladder and James Blunt's Back to Bedlam alongside each other, and found that while Blunt's monster hit was, in its entiretey even worse than the sum of its most famous parts and worse than I could possibly have conceived, White Ladder was a a good album. It held together well, the songs were good, well-sung, well-written, well-arranged, moving, entirely acceptable. Wow, the things you find out ...

The idea of "cool" when it comes to this sort of music is inconsequential now. None of this as survived the modern idea of cool. The idea that once I thought David Gray as way less cool than, I don't know, Tom McRae or Matthew Jay, seems ludicrous. Still, it is surprisingly useful how a couple of modern buzz words can help distinguish between the various whiny WGWG which still provide some of my favourite music - those two words are, wait for it .... cringe and toxic.

Perhaps David Gray's music holds up pretty well because it avoids being excessively cringe or excessively toxic. Blunt - 100% pure cringe. Sheeran, often fairly cringe. Dylan - pretty toxic. Ryan Adams - 100% pure toxic. Coldplay - really, at times, pretty cringe and toxic. Wow, I think I've solved the singer-songwriter conundrum at long last.

The reality is, as much as people moan about it, this kind of music is still incredibly popular. Perhaps the only thing more boring than a boring white guy singing and playing guitar is a boring white guy moaning about a boring white guy singing and playing guitar (though I suspect I am now proving that the only thing more boring than a boring white guy moaning about a boring white guy singing and playing guitar is a boring white guy moaning about a boring white guy moaning about a boring white guy singing and playing guitar). Now none of it is cool. But most of it is impervious to fashion. So, of this most bulletproof of brands, the post-Buckley guitar guy, I boldly state that one of the originators, David Gray, was really not so bad after all, and that is most famous song is a pretty nice song. So there.